A "CONTINGENCY fund" has been set up in order to save Oldham Athletic from administration, should the club ever find itself in that situation again.

The recently rebranded Oldham Athletic Supporters Foundation - formerly Trust Oldham - has launched a lottery in order to generate ring-fenced funds that can be ploughed back into the club in the future.

Around £4,000 was raised inside the first week. And Foundation members, who plan to call on former Latics managers to be 'guardians' of the fund, hope that one day they will have enough in the pot to be able to afford to buy Boundary Park.

Philippa Whittaker, OASF finance director, said the crisis of 2004 - when they went into administration having run up debts of £2.9million having recorded losses of £50,000 a week under multi-millionaire former owner Chris Moore - was still fresh in their memory and something they did not want a repeat of.

"We have launched a contingency fund that is basically what it says it is," she said.

"We are running a lottery to build the contingency fund up, and that's already raised into the thousands in a week. There has been a lot of interest in it.

"We are aware that we are in the same position the club was in in 2004, where we are dependent on the largesse of a dominant owner pumping money into a loss making club and that's not a good place to be.

"We want to build up a fund of money and we are going to have what we call guardians of it. We are hoping to appoint a number of people, some of them ex-Latics managers.

"We do have some people in mind but I can't really say at this moment because we have still got to actually get them to agree."

And Whittaker said the fund could be put to a number of uses in the future.

"We may step in to avoid the club going into administration, if that were the case. If we went out of the League that would be a disaster because we can't do a phoenix club anymore.

"It may be used to put a bid in for the stadium in the future, although obviously we would have to have millions.

"We might be looking to make an investment into the club.

"It would give us a substantial amount of money so the guardians would decide the best way to use that fund to pursue our objective to maintain a competitive professional football club based in Oldham."

The new lottery costs £1 to play, for a minimum of five weeks or a one-off minimum £5 payment.

The first draw is scheduled for 2pm on Sunday (May 30), and then will take place every Sunday at 2pm after that, with the registration cut-off at 1pm on the day of the draw.

OASF have teamed up with Clubforce to manage the lottery.